Features

Wouldn't phones be nice, if...?

Next time you curse your phone, and say: "If only it would..." or "Wouldn't it be nice if it..." try not to blame your phone builder too much. Think about the trouble we have with designing stories for NewsWireless, and realise that the phone builder probably agrees with you.

The trouble with writing Web pages is that you have to use web edit software. Web editing software design, as with designing phones, has the serious problem that mostly, the people who create it are not trying to solve the problems that the customers have.

And the problem with phone design isn't that Nokia and LG and even Microsoft and HTC aren't crammed with people rushing around saying: "Hey! I thought of a great new feature!" - there are hundreds.

But if you work inside a phone company, you aren't selling to yourself, or other phone users.

You're dealing with their suppliers - the network operators. Apple may have changed that with the iPhone. If only someone could do a similar shakeup with the Web scripts!

Phones, of course, are designed for network operators. Quite understandably, too. If the customer wants something, well of course that's interesting, but you can't call it important. What matters is whether the people who give these phones to the customers think they can make money out of it.

This web site is operated by me, the Editor. I get a truly splendid design job done for me by the hosting and managing company, Webhorus; and part of what they give me is an editor, called the FCKEditor, for the HTML.

It lets me do things like embed pictures, large or small; it lets me do bold face type, and big headlines.

The important thing, however, is that the web designer does not design HTML editors. Instead, they go out into the market, and buy one. Also, the web designer doesn't use a web-based editor; they have a sophisticated content management design process.

So if I want to put a picture into my story, and I often do! - I start off by telling my Web editor package: Put a picture in the story. And the FCKEditor rushes off and puts up a dialog box.

Now, you probably won't believe how many steps are involved in this process, especially if you're used to blog editors like Wordpress or LiveJournal. In those, you press the picture icon, it says "upload, or use something already uploaded?" and you upload the picture. Bang! - done.

FCKEditor starts of by saying "Browse server." It starts off, in other words, by assuming you aren't going to upload a picture. You want to use a picture that's already uploaded. This is hardly ever the case with me; I do news! I carry a camera. But my interests aren't of concern to the writer of the FCKEditor; the software is offering me a question - browse server? and the only answer is "yes." So then it lists all the picture folders, and asks me which folder my picture is in. Again, the option to say "none of those, I want to upload!" isn't offered.

In Internet Explorer, on a low-power laptop, running over a mobile phone connection to the Internet, it can take as much as 45 seconds for the file list to appear. If things go wrong, you can find yourself having to restart, after a minute or two. But until the process is over, you can't see the list of files.

Well, so what? I don't want the list of files! I want to upload! Well, yes... but see, the way the software is designed, the menu item which says "upload a new file here" and "Choose File" [image, left] doesn't appear until AFTER you've seen the list. That's the way it is.

My patience isn't finished, but FCKEditor achieves that in close order. I press the button, choose a file, and then wait till it's uploaded. And wait. And wait...

Now, in LiveJournal, the upload process takes about 30 seconds if you aren't in a hurry - start to finish. In FCKEditor, the process can take two, or even three minutes; and if you're out in the field, you just won't try, because you may be stuck with a GPRS connection. After five minutes of struggling, the whole thing will time out, and all your work may be thrown away.

Naturally, I asked my web page designers if they had a fix for this. Quite understandably, they pointed out that they aren't designers of scripts for editing HTML in a browser. And, with commendable patience, they gave me the name of the people who provide the FCKEditor.

So I wrote to them, and explained my predicament, and asked, quite simply, if the "upload file here" bit could possibly be included in the initial dialog box (which, you'll recall, simply says "browse server?) as an extra feature.

Six months later, I received a reply!

"It isn't necessary. So we won't make the change."

The same argument applies when someone runs along the corridor inside Sony Ericsson, saying "I've got this great idea!"

The idea may well be great. Indeed, it's possible that it would make the phone more popular, and a bigger seller. But what matters to Sony Ericsson is a quite different question: whether DoCoMo will give the phone to its customers. Or whether Cingular will adopt it. Or whether Telefonica will make it a star brand in Argentina.

And it won't, if some smart-arse kid shows up with a brand new feature which makes the package look wrong, after all, just at the point where deals for 50,000 phones are being signed. "What do you mean, you need to make changes? Is it broken? how much delay?? Wow. I think we'd better go with the deal from Qualcomm after all..."

And that's why there aren't so many pictures in NewsWireless as we'd both like, and why most mobile phones on the market are no better than they have to be. The change isn't necessary